But that’s not all; there’s a huge gamut of genuinely useful new features as it reaches version 3.0. Let’s check these off:

8K support (hardware decoding is on by default)

HDR and 10 bit video

HMDI Audio passthrough

Network browsing for NAS systems

360 video and 3D audio

Modifying subtitle size live

Drag and drop support

HD DVD support

As a neat bonus, VLC versions will now line up on mobile and desktop devices.

It’s worth noting that Chromecast could be a big performance and battery drain depending on the type of video you’re using. As per VLC’s blog post:

If media codecs are supported by your Chromecast device, VLC only acts as a streaming server (which is battery consuming). If not, VLC will transcode andstream media, which is highly cpu and battery consuming.

For reference, Chromecast only supports a handful of video codecs (especially if you have an earlier model). Still, that caveat aside, it’s been a long time coming, but totally worth it. I finally won’t have to pull out an HDMI cable just to watch videos through my video player of choice. For more information on the features in VLC 3.0, head on over to the download page or the developer blog post below.